The fossil record of complex insect mouthparts
seem to show that they adapted to nectar producing plants long before flowers
appeared. Piattelli-Palmarini states that this flies in the face of
conventional evolutionary principles that predict a series of small
steps between flowers and insects adapting to each other.1 He refers
to an earlier article on insect fossils, "Insect Diversity in the Fossil
Record" by C. Lababdeira and J. Sepkoski. They state:

The more startling interpretation
that can be drawn from the data is that the appearance and expansion of
angiosperms had no influence on insect familiesº
The fact remains that the post-Paleozoic radiation of insect families
commenced more than 100 million years before angiosperms appeared in the fossil
record.2º
we have examined a
few synoptic aspects of the fossil record of insects, and the results contradict
several notions about what macroevolutionary patterns can be seen among fossil
insectsº3

Another step in this awkward direction is
found in a Sciencereview entitled "Mutual
Satisfaction." These authors studied the obligate mutualism of the yucca
moth by looking at the DNA of the yucca and several related moths. They
concluded, based on the hypothetical ancestry, that "chance and
pro-existing conditions may be more important than a long history of
togethernessº [and] that co-opting
existing functions is the key to the evolution of novelty."4

Even if over-designed, those
insects had to feed efficiently on something. Another review in Science entitled,
"Permian Pollen Eaters,"describes fossilized pollen in the gut of a
Permian insect found in the Ural Mountains.5 The pollen is assumed to
have been eaten as food. This insect died well before the appearance of flowers
in the early Cretaceous. The authors identified the pollen as an air
dispersal type suggesting that the insects were exploiting pollen as food
before the plants exploited the insects for dispersal.

For the Christian, this evidence raises a
couple of questions. Could God have used pro-existing adaptation of insects as
evidence of his creative agency, or even as an evidence of a young earth and
short creation days? Possibly (I prefer the former). Does the fossil evidence
unquestionably demonstrate that coevolution doesn't happen (in this case) and
that evolutionists must conclude again that useful trait suddenly "just
fits" another function? Possibly. The jury is still out, and we must not
rush to make too much of this yet.6